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So, I love me some Diana Degette, always have, always will. There’s a reason she will remain in office forever. However, I still find it a bit of a downer that she has been really the only major elected office holder who has taken a positive stance on the passage of Amendment 64. The reluctance of Hickenlooper and other Colorado dems to own up to a significant piece of legislation that was passed with a significant amount of approval has been nauseating. If ever there were a situation that defined the importance of states’ rights in this country, it is this one right here; and this ‘well, let’s just wait and let the feds do whatever they want regardless of the will of the people’ attitude should be offensive to every right thinking Coloradan. Continue reading →

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So, a lot of people (including me) saw that one coming. I just never imagined that the GOP secret chiefs were so vain that they would end up taking their own propaganda as truth. At some point they lost the distinction between math, and the math they were doing to make their candidate feel better. Mitt Romney didn’t help his cause any himself, in fact he almost single-handedly won the election for Obama back in 2011, with his campaign tactics in the primaries. By perpetually locking the second (or briefly first) place candidate in a series of negative ads, America was pretty well versed in every negative aspect of Mitt Romney long before Obama had run a single ad. Of course, Romney also ran the most secretive political campaign in history, with the bulk of his policy offerings consisting of, as Stephen Colbert put it, “you’ll find out later.”

Like this:

So, a lot of people (including me) saw that one coming. I just never imagined that the GOP secret chiefs were so vain that they would end up taking their own propaganda as truth. At some point they lost the distinction between math, and the math they were doing to make their candidate feel better. Mitt Romney didn’t help his cause any himself, in fact he almost single-handedly won the election for Obama back in 2011, with his campaign tactics in the primaries. By perpetually locking the second (or briefly first) place candidate in a series of negative ads, America was pretty well versed in every negative aspect of Mitt Romney long before Obama had run a single ad. Of course, Romney also ran the most secretive political campaign in history, with the bulk of his policy offerings consisting of, as Stephen Colbert put it, “you’ll find out later.”

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You know, the fact that the media has given up calling major pary politicians and pundits on outright lies and distortions has really freed up the republicans in what must be some very enjoyable ways. Never before has a political party been so thoroughly able to employ the strategy of employing toxic and harmful policies, and then blaming their opponents for the results during an election cycle. Had the republicans employed this strategy in 1996, and blamed Clinton and the Democrats for shutting down the government and being petty obstructionists, Clinton might have been a one term president. Of course, none of this would be possible without the persistent hard work of a mainstream media, that, when not posessed of conservative bias, is posessed of a laziness bias. Sure, you could question the validity of blaming Obama for things that are the direct result of Bush policies or Republican policies or would have been aided by bills that republicans persistently blocked, but that’s work. It’s so much easier to just repeat what the candidates say as if each is accurate, even when they directly contradict. Of course, major props go out to Fox News, as well, a network that has a lack of decenty that would make Joseph McCarthy blush. Clearly, Rupert Murdoch’s experiences with helping the Chinese government with their television networks taught the man a great deal. Through all of this wonderful magic (or illusions, if you will) the Republican party, and their ultra-wealthy supporters, have managed to create some kind of completely fictional alternate reality in which Barack Obama is a socialist and fascist monster who took over an America of wonderful opportunity and fantastic wealth, where everyone was happy and employed, and turned it into an Orwellian nightmare in which Christians are a persecuted minority and rich people are being robbed by a government that hands their money to lazy, shiftless bums. Which is admirable, I guess.

Honesty is something that is largely absent from today’s political discourse, but to a seasoned observer certain truths become fairly obvious. The first of which, that arose in 2007, but became painfully obvious in 2011, was that the Republican Party has a Mitt Romney problem. Now, I live in Colorado, so I had little previous exposure to Mitt Romney, other than the fact that he was oddly unpersonable for a major political candidate. After learning more about him, it became obvious why he succeeded as a Massachussets governor. He was an unbearably snobbish upper class puritan who’s only real values are money, class, and power; and who would say anything or support anything he thought would increase his status in one of those three areas. Unfortunately, this type of behavior doesn’t particularly play well across the country, and it certainly didn’t hurt Romney that he has a fuckton of cash and ran in one of the most heavily Republican leaning election years in modern history (2002).

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When I was a teenager, I think 15 or so, as most American male teenagers of higher than average intelligence do, I went through an Ayn (pronounced ‘ein’) Rand phase. I’m not ashamed to admit it, even though it is the philosophical equivalent to a spoiled teen girl’s belief that the world revolves around her. As a philosophy, Objectivism is not without redeeming features. However, in order to implement Objectivism in the real world, it would require two conditions be met in order to not collapse into a Somalian style warlord society. The first condition is that everyone be a genius, and the second would be that everyone have an innately benevolent nature. In fact, despite the nature of some of her more ardent followers, the entirety of Rand’s philosophy rests on an innate belief in the good nature of man. It was her general belief that it was only when given institutionalized authority over other men that the more negative aspects of man’s nature took over. To summarize: if we lived in a world where everyone was a genius with no ill will towards his fellow man, objectivism would be a perfect philosophy for everyone. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case.

I’m going to presume that everyone is by now familiar with the Akin nonsense. Stunningly, both Phyllas Schlafly and Bryan Fischer from the AFA had refrained from commenting until now. There’s many terrible things in that article, but by far the worst is this gem at the end:

Fischer lamented that “everybody is gang tackling Todd Akin.” “You talk about a forcible situation, you talk about somebody being a victim of forcible assault, that would be Todd Akin,” Fischer maintained.

So, just to be clear, what Bryan Fischer is saying that, while nobody has said that rape isn’t bad (although marital rape doesn’t apparently exist) one kind of rape that is way worse than ‘forcible rape’, or ‘legitimate rape’ or ‘fraudulent rape to get abortion money’ is the kind that is currently happening to Todd Akin. So yes, again, to be clear, figurative rape = worse than rape rape. Also, the term is gangbanging.